Lisa's Blog

  In my dim and distant childhood, the alleged rise in the earth's temperature was a hotly contested theory. In 2024, we hotly contested fires. It stopped raining in January, and by May, temperatures reached unbearable triple digits.  Parrots dropped dead from the trees. A group of peccaries were found dying, spooking villagers who were tempted to feast on a windfall of wild pig meat, but what had killed them?  Then the fires started.  Much of southern and western Belize’s tropical rainforest burned. Corpses of wildlife littered the blackened hills, including, heartbreakingly, a mother tapir who died with her babies huddled beneath her. Farmers in San Pedro Columbia lost about half of the cultivated land (much of it planted in chocolate trees) to fire. The butterfly farmers, depending as they do on an intact local ecosystem, are struggling, although we are so blessed that our homes did not burn. My family joined in the fight to put out one of the first of the fires t...

  When I came to San Pedro Columbia, bought a piece of abandoned land with no electricity or road access, and built myself a little shelter in the bush, many villagers predicted that a jaguar would eat me. But not Julio Sanchez. He offered to help build me a house. I paid him, of course, but he was also my friend and guide. He could have used yemeri trees cut in the wrong moon, and I wouldn't have known the difference, but he built me a good house, anyways.  While others sought to prank me, advising me that the best way to rid my farm of leafcutter ants was to strip naked, cover my body with grease, and dig for the queen, Mr. Julio took me seriously. He called me Licia, the Spanish version of my name, and gave me wise advice. "It is good to have land, Licia, to farm and also to pass on to your children."  Mr. Julio stopped by often on his way to his pasture down the river, where he maintained cows and the white horse he rode. He mentioned his work with the Catholic C...

  George Cadle Price (1919-2011), Prime Minister and author of Belize’s independence, was squatting in the dust in front of Minch’s Grocery Shop in San Pedro Columbia, Toledo, chatting with local schoolchildren when I met him for the first time in 1992. Price wore his signature Guayabera shirt and, hatless, he squinted in the sun.  His thick, black-rimmed glasses gave him an owlish, intellectual look. He was a bit stooped but seemed far younger than his 73 years as he straightened and leaned against a battered Land Rover. He had stopped in this remote village without fanfare, accompanied only by his driver. Emerging from Minch’s shop, I blinked. Could this be the Prime Minister? I hadn’t had much experience with heads of state, but once my US hometown had been honored by a visit from President Reagan and Secret Service had spent weeks sweeping the area beforehand. On the appointed day, the Great Man had swept past, invisible behind his tinted windows, invincible in his large m...